A picture of health

I haven't had time to do much freelance work recently, but I was interested in this project. I was commissioned by an IT team from a local art school (Falmouth University). They had just completed a year-long project on developing a system for standardising and organising course descriptors. It was a complex project with many twists and turns, people joining the team and different challenges along the way. For a final meeting, organised by their funders at JISC, they had to display a poster that explained their project, alongside 30 or so other projects. They were conscious that, as an arts organisation, they had to have something that looked the part, hence my involvement. After an initial meeting, and a few emails, I asked them to give me a spreadsheet of all the significant dates / milestones connected to the project, and to assign team member(s) to each one: I wanted to represent each team member as a coloured line, and each event as a circle with matching colours.

I'm very honoured that our graphic (entitled The Pharma Transport Town: Undestanding the Routes to Sustainable Pharmaceutical Use) has been published in the journal Science recently - as winner of the "People's Choice" award in the NSF/AAAS International Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge 2012: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/vis2012/ The entries can also be viewed here: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2012.jsp There are some other excellent entries this year too, in all categories.

I enjoyed speaking at the Design of Understanding event at St Bride Library the week before last. It was good to hear some feedback from the design community about the work I'm doing in communicating scientific data with graphics. I was also really impressed by the wonderful visual notes produced by not one but two of the delegates at the event! The first from Boon Yew Chew: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaremfan/8414252564/in/set-72157632608232968/ I think it's a really good summary. I like the quick sketches to remind him of three of my graphics - the Pharma Town, GOfER and the climate change arrow / box graphics. Also very pleased to hear that he thinks graphics should be academic work in their own right, although it is mostly written papers that get published (albeit with occasional diagrams). It's always a challenge that design academics (and students) face. One point of clarification - I don't think that bar and pie charts are necessarily A Bad Thing